Simone Rebaudengo

Simone Rebaudengo hails from Turin, lived in Sweden for a while, and now spends most of his time in Munich where he works as an interaction designer with Frog Design.

His fascination with the way that people and objects interact with each has led to some amazing work. Not content with exploring the Internet Of Things, he‘s experimenting with the Internet Of Things With Feelings. He paints an all-too-believable picture of how network-enabled objects might behave when they know how other objects on the network are being used. I, for one, welcome our neurotic robotic overlords.

We invited Simone to come along and speak at our other conference, UX London, and it was a smash hit. I remember thinking, “Oh man, this is perfect for this year’s dConstruct!”

Great; things are connected, but what will they actually talk about?

We take it for granted that smart and connected products will bring a benefit to our lives, but connecting is only the first step.

To get away from the repetitive visions of the connected, efficient and sterile home of the future and to look for new and more human scenarios, we need to shift from designing internets to designing relationships of things.

People have bias, stereotypes and cultural beliefs that they pass into the products that they design. Companies have business goals that they have to meet and rivalries with other competitors. If we take the point of view of a product in this scenario, how will its life change?

New relationships and conversations will emerge between products with different goals or references and at the same time with people that will live with them.

If we stop only drawing dotted lines between products, but we actually start looking at what relationship could emerge on that line, we will find ourselves exploring a new way of understating services and interactions with connected products.